During the 2013 season, volunteers from the SABR community participated in reviewing the radio and television broadcasts of major league clubs to provide their assessment of the quality of those broadcasts, based on the following attributes:
- Play by Play
- Color Commentary
- Broadcast Team Commentary
- Charisma and Chemistry
- Analysis
- Production Values
- Commercialism and Cutaways
The idea behind using the 20-80 scouting system was to ensure that most of the grades for most categories within an article will be clustered around the range of 45-55. This is in part to control for unwarranted grade inflation or deflation, and ensure that only those categories in which a broadcast team did remarkably better or worse go beyond this mean.
The final grade given a broadcast team constituted a weighted average of the grades given for each of the seven individual categories. All categories were weighted times two except for the last two, Production Values and Commercialism, which will be weighted times one. For example, here is the grading for the Royals TV review:
Reviewers were asked to take in more than one game, to get a feel for the broadcast team’s performance across multiple instances.
To see a list of each broadcast team and links to their review as written by the reviewers themselves (if available), click here.
To see an overall scorecard for those broadcast teams that have been reviewed to date, click here.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in these evaluations are solely those of the authors. As such, the views expressed by said authors should not be interpreted as representing the opinions of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), its board, or anyone otherwise affiliated with SABR. Likewise, the conclusions included in these evaluations are not to be viewed or interpreted as official endorsements (or lack thereof) by SABR, or of anyone affiliated with SABR, of any particular broadcasters or broadcast organizations.